Bulls, bears: What are you afraid of?

To review, as I laid out yesterday, there are a lot of markets that sure seem prime to go crazy here. We all know there are huge imbalances and artificially propped up asset prices around the globe and here in the US. Is this the time when we get some serious regression towards the mean? Or just a little one? Will the Fed blink and let the markets know they ain’t ever gonna get done getting undone all of the stuff they’ve done?

As the best value investor I know, Robert Marcin, laid out on WallStreetAllStars.com today, “C’mon Ben, spike the punchbowl even more! Taper, shmapir! Unemployment is close to 6.5% so I want $100 billion a month through year end. My MITE stocks need the lube to make even higher highs. What about food and energy inflation you ask? Hah, they only matter for losers. The stock market is the country and the country is measured only by the stock market, so go to it. We need more punchbowl prosperity and a Dow 20,000!!! And who needs to rile the markets right before retirement? Easy Al pumped em up into the end of his term, so you can do the same.” He’s being sarcastic, in case you didn’t know.

Or, as I put it back in 2007 when I was a TV anchor on Fox, “Don’t call it a ‘recession’ because it’s really just a ‘refresh-ion’ and it’s not only good for your teeth, but it’s good to wash out the excesses and imbalances often rather than letting them build up like we have.”

How much better off would our world and economy be today if the Republican Democrat Regime and the Federal Reserve had simply let the markets refresh back in 2007 as I was suggesting?

At any rate, the whole point of all of this is that we want to get a big sampling of answers in our poll of “Who’s more scared right now, the bulls or the bears?” When it’s 90% “Bulls are more scared”, it’s often a great contrarian indicator that it’s time to get long and when it’s 90% “Bears are more scared” it’s often time to sell. Did we already hit a peak off the recent market moves? Please click here and vote in our poll and I’ll report back Monday with the results and deeper analysis on those results then.

No trades for me today, as I’m positioned where I want to be overall for now and I’d really like to see an extreme measure in the poll results before making any new moves for now.

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